Spammers Tapping Computing Power of Botnets
Say what you will about spammers and bot herders, at least they don't waste CPU cycles. With large botnets at their disposals, spammers are adding 3D effects to their image spam. F-Secure is reporting an increase in 3D image spam. By varying the look with color and 3D effects, the spammers avoid detection.
If spammers didn't have access to such large botnets they couldn't pull this off to any sizable scale. This seems to be a case where a quantitative difference in the size of botnets is making a qualitative difference in how they beat filters. Fortunately there are other ways to control spam, see Article 5: Combating Botnets: What Can Be Done? in The Essentials Series: Messaging and Web Security, Volume II for more.
Update: A computer science researcher estimates, the botnet created by the Storm attack can now outperform the top supercomputers in the world. Peter Gutmann says in a post at Insecure.org
This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer has been controlled not by a government or megacorporation but by criminals. The question remains, now that they have the world's most powerful supercomputer system at their disposal, what are they going to do with it?
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